The Seven-year Ditch: our story
Like most graduate recruiters, we go through the yearly ritual of carefully curating an artillery of branded merchandise to deploy primarily over the course of our recruiting season, because we have always considered this to be a vital, unequivocal aspect of our branding on campus.
In 2013/14 we were producing over 10,000 glossy brochures a year, buying the same number of pens, pads of paper, and countless other items such as mugs, umbrellas, oyster card holders, water bottles and a myriad of branded artefacts. As each Milkround season approached, these items would be loaded into our logistics vans and sent off on their four-month tour of the UK. However, every time we would leave a law fair, without fail the floors would be littered with discarded merchandise and the bins would be overflowing with brochures and leaflets that were no longer wanted – they were headed for landfill.
We began to reflect on how much influence does our branded merchandise really have over a candidate's decision to engage with us? How could we justify the duplication in the leaflets and flyers we were producing for fairs and the content that was already available via our website? Did we have a responsibility to come up with a greener, cleaner approach?